Dr Elisabetta Magnanti is a Post-Doctoral University Assistant in the Department of History at the University of Vienna, where she completed her PhD in History (Key Research Area: Digital Humanities) under the co-supervision of the University of St Andrews (2024). 

After obtaining a first-level MSc in Computer Science for Electronic Text Processing (2019) and a MA in Germanic Philology (2020), Elisabetta undertook further training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Oxford in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for Big Data and Text Processing.

Her research specialises in the application of computational methods to palaeographical and philological analysis of Old English and Anglo-Latin source material.

Since 2022, in collaboration with Prof. Mark Faulkner (Trinity College Dublin), Elisabetta has been co-developing Ansund, a project harnessing Computer Vision and Machine Learning to create a new, exhaustive, open-access corpus of Old English. A Proof-of-Concept article, 'Corpus Palaeography: Machine Learning, Scribal Profiling and the Dating and Localisation of Manuscripts Containing Old English, c. 800–1200’, is forthcoming in Speculum (2027). 

Another major strand of her research investigates the manuscript transmission, dissemination, and reception of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, with particular attention to the earliest witnesses of the work. She has recently identified a previously unknown early ninth-century manuscript of Cædmon’s Hymn, an account of which is forthcoming in Early Medieval England and its Neighbours (formerly Anglo-Saxon England) and is currently preparing a major grant application to support further research in this area.

Prior to joining the University of Vienna in 2021, Elisabetta was affiliated with the Department for Science and Information Technology at the headquarters of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris.

At Vienna, she teaches as part of Digital Humanities master's programme offering courses on computer vision for medieval manuscripts, computational palaeography and stemmatology, TEI-XML encoding, digital scholarly editing, and textual criticism. 

Current affiliation: Since 2025, Elisabetta is a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin.